Former 'Jeopardy' champ Ken Jennings coming to Camarillo

This champ of 'Jeopardy!' will speak to local students

"Jeopardy!" champion Ken Jennings (left) reacts to a right answer after being quizzed by talk show host David Letterman on the set of the "Late Show with David Letterman" on Nov. 3, 2004, in New York. Jennings finally lost on the Nov. 30 broadcast after becoming the biggest money winner in TV game show history, earning $2,520,700 over a 74-game run.

Associated Press, file

To speak in Camarillo: Author and former "Jeopardy" champion Ken Jennings is the keynote speaker Tuesday night at the 29th annual Star Scholar Awards banquet at the Serra Center, 5205 Upland Road in Camarillo. The event is slated to run from 5 to 9 p.m. Dinner tickets are $50. For more information, call 437-0446 or visit http://store.vcstar.com.

Before Ken Jennings ever got hooked on "Jeopardy!" he was hooked on maps.

When he was 7, he saved up his allowance money for months to buy a 1979 Hammond's Medallion World Atlas. He slept with it next to his pillow.

"I'd fall asleep reading it; it was like the teddy bear or the security blanket," Jennings recently told The Star. "Maps and atlases were the first time as a kid that I was transported by facts."

He is of course the guy whose 74-game, $2.5-million winning streak on "Jeopardy!" captivated the nation in 2004 until it was finally stopped when he lost to Nancy Zerg of Ventura.

Jennings tithed some of his game show loot to his church, took a trip to Europe, bought a home-theater system and invested or saved the rest. He also quit his job as a computer programmer in Utah, moved back to his Seattle roots and became more or less a full-time author.

His latest effort, "Maphead: Charting the Wide, Weird World of Geography Wonks," came out on paperback Tuesday (the hardcover version was issued last fall). The heartfelt toast to "geo-geeks" is his third book, and he's already finished a fourth that's slated to be published early next year.

Long before that, Jennings returns to Ventura County on Tuesday evening, when he will speak to The Star Scholar Awards program honorees (the area's top graduating high school seniors) at a banquet in the Serra Center in Camarillo.

Brains, "Jeopardy!" and maps figure to be discussion topics.

When he was a kid, "I could literally look at maps for hours," Jennings writes in the new book.

In "Maphead," Jennings takes readers around the world to find people like him. He taps the London Map Fair, geography whiz kids at the National Geographic Bee, and computer programmers at Google Earth. He also participates in the "St. Valentine's Day Massacre," an annual map rally in which contestants travel a meandering back roads route between the Golden Gate Bridge and the Statue of Liberty — all without leaving their armchairs or kitchen tables (the journey is made entirely on maps).

Jennings, in an interview earlier this month from a suburban Seattle park while playing with his 5-year-old daughter, defined a maphead as "someone who is weird enough to read a road atlas for pleasure." Or someone who plans an entire vacation around a spot they got fixated with on a map.

Such people, he said, are deeply committed to maps and places.

"They are people who can project themselves into the map, and have imaginary adventures in it," Jennings said. "I don't know what causes it. I think it's something you were born with, and not made into."

Jennings, who turns 38 next month, said "having a mastery of maps gives you a sense of power." They're also familiar comforts.

"Until the Google Maps revolution," he noted, "maps hadn't changed all that much in some 500 years, which shows what an elegant solution they were to the problem."

HOT SPOTS

His first map was one of those U.S. jigsaw puzzles where there was a picture of a lobster on Maine, a gator on Florida, an ear of corn on Iowa and so on. That Hammond atlas was "the most primal bedrock of my youthful nerdiness"; National Geographic's map of the month also was a treasure.

Any map, Jennings said, was a map worth exploring.

"My bucket list of secret travel ambitions," he writes in the book, "isn't made up of boring places like Athens or Tahiti."

Rather, he wants to visit places such as Weirton, W.Va. — the only town in the nation that borders two states apart from its own.

A chapter includes a fun look at bizarre place names, such as Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, a 58-letter locale in Wales that translated means "St. Mary's church in the hollow of the white hazel near to the rapid whirlpool of Llantysilio of the red cave."

Closer to home, he details and explains such colorful names as Cheesequake, N.J., Ding Dong, Texas, and Goose Pimple Junction, Va. The last, for example, supposedly got its name because it was once home to a warring couple whose noisy obscenities would make their neighbors' skins crawl.

One of his favorite bizarre place names is Zzyzx, Calif., which Jennings believes is the alphabetically last geographic name on the planet.

Any eagle-eyed road warrior hard-wired into that Los Angeles-Las Vegas pipeline knows of Zzyzx; it's just off Interstate 15 in eastern California in the desert south of Baker. Jennings spotted it when he traveled between Utah and Los Angeles to tape "Jeopardy!" and pulled off the road once to take a look.

Turns out that Zzyzx was once the name of a health spa-hot springs in the 1940s and now is home to a California State University center that studies desert wildlife. The name has also inspired a punk song, a novel and a Katherine Heigl movie.

Elsewhere, Jennings touches on everything from parchment maps and grade-school spinning globes to geocaching and GPS.

His favorite group of mapheads? The kids at the National Geographic Bee.

"The world hadn't beaten it out of them yet, you know?" he said. "They were so enthusiastic. They were all there because of maps, and they didn't think twice about that."

ALEX TREBEK, WITHOUT PANTS

Maps, he said, offer good learning opportunities, a message he'll try to impart to the Star Scholars on Tuesday night.

"It's not just OK to be smart, it's great," Jennings said. "The most valuable thing in life is what you learn."

He double-majored in computer science and English at Brigham Young University, where he captained the school's academic competition team and participated in national quiz bowls.

Jennings said he's also going to speak up for people having facts on their fingertips "and not just diving into the Web every time they need some answers."

He'll also talk about his experiences on "Jeopardy!" noting that smart kids love the show and are one of its core audiences. "Kids stop me in the grocery store and want to talk about 'Jeopardy!' " he said.

He might also tell them about the time he saw "Jeopardy!" host Alex Trebek without pants. It's an image Jennings said won't fade from his mind anytime soon; let's just say it has to do with Trebek overhearing some miked contestants joking about how nervous they were.

It was quite a ride for Jennings eight years ago. His 74-game winning streak catapulted him to national fame; he went on Leno, Letterman and "Sesame Street." Barbara Walters named him one of the 10 most fascinating people of 2004. Slate magazine dubbed him "the Michael Jordan of trivia" and "the Seabiscuit of geekdom."

"It was a long time ago," Jennings said. "It seems like a dream now — the fact that I ever did it was amazing. I can't believe it actually happened."

The "Jeopardy" streak began with the June 2, 2004, show and continued until Nov. 30. That's when Zerg beat him on the Final Jeopardy clue, "Most of this firm's 70,000 seasonal white-collar workers work only four months a year." When Zerg correctly answered "Who is H&R Block?" and Jennings guessed FedEx, it was over.

Jennings said he and Zerg stay in touch via email from time to time. He noted that she came out to see him for "a nice chat" when he hosted a trivia contest in Moorpark in 2008.

Oddly enough, Jennings, a "Jeopardy!" fan since he was 10, said he doesn't watch the show much anymore.

"I'd like to … but nowadays I just can't," he said, explaining, "I'll hear Alex's voice or the theme music, and I get tense. I get very worked up. It's like I have post-traumatic game show disorder or something."

Zerg laughed when apprised of his comments, saying: "That sounds like something Ken would say. He's such a funny guy, and a great guy."

She has no such qualms about watching the show, saying, "Oh yeah; once a 'Jeopardy!' freak, always a 'Jeopardy!' freak."

Zerg said her moment of fame still flares occasionally.

"People treat me differently because of it," said Zerg, who has lived in Ventura for 18 years, many spent as a real estate agent. "They throw a lot of trivia questions at me, and if they have a dispute, I get called in to provide an answer."

Even now? Responded Zerg: "I know, can you believe it?"

POINT THE CAR SOMEWHERE AND GO

Jennings has journeyed far beyond "Jeopardy!" In addition to 5-year-old daughter Caitlin, he and his wife, Mindy, shepherd their 9-year-old son, Dylan, and a Labrador retriever named Banjo.

His next and fourth book, titled "Because I Said So," is due out next January. It's a parenting trivia book; it examines, he said, "all those myths" Mom and Dad told you — such as "Don't swim after you eat" — and tries to determine, through science, the facts and untruths behind them.

He's also due to be part of a mobile phone app this summer in which people will play against him in trivia contests. "I think it's called Ken Jennings' Trivia Death March," he cracked.

Right now, his focus might be on a map of how to get back to Ventura County. Some critics have said "Maphead" manages to make geography sound fun and cool.

Jennings laughed when told that, adding: "The book definitely was a hard sell. I was just trying to express my enthusiasm, that point of view."

He did so nicely. It's almost enough to make you want to jump in the car and drive to Goose Pimple Junction.